I moved from New York to Little Rock, Arkansas, my hometown, and in 1993, I volunteered to teach parenting classes to incarcerated women in my state’s prison. In 1998, I was asked by the warden to develop a prenatal/post-partum class for the increasing number of pregnant women in the prison, whereupon I requested the inclusion of women who had delivered within the last year. From 1998 until 2004, I participated in a community group of pregnant and post-delivery incarcerated women for an hour and a half each week, fifty weeks a year.
We shared everything except the truly impressive portions of carbohydrates and grease that were delivered on plastic trays during our lunchtime class. The laughter and humor they shared regarding the food was endearing, but the food was maddeningly unhealthy, especially given their pregnant condition. Equally frustrating was the fact that some of the pregnant mothers who had just entered the prison did not receive any prenatal vitamins for weeks or months. Most startling was the absence of a folic acid supplement, proven critical to the health of both the mother and child. As most of the women suffered from addiction, an illness that necessarily distracts one from attending to one’s own wellness, they had not been receiving prenatal services prior to their arrest. This delay in receipt of either vitamins or folic acid, compounded by the dangerous physical effects of the mother’s trauma upon incarceration, often worked to harm the unborn child.
Many of the prison’s policies appeared to purposefully withhold any pregnancy-specific accommodations until the last possible moment, and often this was too late to have any real effect on the health or comfort of either the mother or the child. For example, the policy of the prison was not to provide an extra one-inch sleeping pad until the last trimester, and often these were not forthcoming. Sleeping on a one-inch pad was difficult and painful for most of the pregnant women. Sometimes other women in the barracks would give up their only pad to the pregnant women. I heard many stories of how other women would protect their pregnant prison-mates.
As the first members began to deliver their babies, they were, in many cases, appearing back in my prenatal class only two or three hours after their deliveries. Cramping, exhausted, hormonally zigzagging, and in great despair after being separated from their newborns, they still came to the class. Not surprisingly, they required immediate comfort, both emotional and physical (including massages), and desperately sought the chance to describe their experiences. What they shared was difficult to hear and had little in common with my own childbirth experiences, or those I had witnessed years before as a Lamaze instructor.
Here were women living in the first-world at the end of the 20th century, who were forbidden any free movement during labor. Instead, they were handcuffed by one wrist, and the opposite ankle shackled. Iron tools of restriction, restraint, and oppression do not belong in any one’s experience of childbirth. Although attachment theory is not solely concerned with immediate contact at birth, most mothers have vivid recollections of their first time holding their newborn, nursing them, checking out all their parts and features. When incarcerated, some states do not allow any contact between the mother and infant after delivery; other states permit some time together, but the mother is usually restrained, either by the wrist or the ankle, or in two-point restraints.
After years of listening to my students’ painful recollections of this process, it is clear that none were allowed any semblance of a positive, meaningful birth. Instead, their childbirths wounded them, deepening their feelings of stigma and shame. Many of the mothers expressed a sense of being further devalued, and felt their babies had been devalued as well. Among the many questions raised here is one addressing the philosophical and pragmatic goals that necessarily direct the course of legal decision-making. When we ask a judge to weigh-in during the sentencing stage of a case, what exactly are we asking of him/her? More to the point: Are the sentencing judges also sentencing these women to a traumatic, hostile childbirth—one that can only effect negatively the health and well-being of both mother and child? When a person is incarcerated, do they deserve to lose the humanity, health, and dignity demanded by most at this stage in civilization? And should those losses reverberate into future generations?
